[dannersy]

Every time this is what I'm told. The difference between learning how to Google properly and then the amount of hoops and in-depth understanding you need to get something useful out of these supposedly revolutionary tools is absurd. I am pretty tired of people trying to convince me that AI, and very specifically generative AI, is the great thing they say it is.

It is also a red flag to see anyone refer to these tools as intelligence as it seems the marketing of calling this "AI" has finally sewn its way into our discourse that even tech forums think the prediction machine is intelligent.

[conception]

I heard it best described to me that if you put in an hour of work, you get five hours of work out of it. Most people just type at it and don’t put in an hour of planning and discussion and scaffolding. They just expect it to work 100% of the time exactly like they want. But you wouldn’t expect that from a junior developer you would put an hour of work into them, teaching them things showing them where the documentation is your patterns how you do things and then you would set them off and they would probably make mistakes and you would document their mistakes for them so they wouldn’t make them again, but eventually, they’d be pretty good. That’s more or less where we are today that will get you success on a great many tasks.

[wnolens]

Exactly my experience and how I leverage Claude where some of my coworkers remain unconvinced.

[danielbln]

"The thing I've learned years ago that is actually complex but now comes easy to me because I take my priors for granted is much easier than the new thing that just came out"

Also, that "it's not really intelligence" horse is so dead, it has already turned into crude oil.

[dannersy]

The point I am making is that this is supposed to be some revolutionary tool that threatens our very society in terms of labor and economics yet the fringe enthusiasts (yes, that is what HN and its users are, an extreme minority of users), and the very people plugged into the weekly changes and additions of model adjustments and tools to leverage them still struggle to show me the value of generative AI day to day. They make big claims, but I don't see them. In fact, I see negatives overwhelming the gains which goes without talking of the product and its usability.

In practice I have seen: flowery emails no one bothers to read, emoji filled summaries and documentation that no one bothers to read or check correctness on, prototypes that create more work for devs in the long run, a stark decline in code quality because it turns out reviewing code is a team's ultimate test of due diligence, ridiculous video generation... I could go on and on. It is blockchain all over again, not in terms of actual usefulness, but in terms of our burning desire to monetize it in irresponsible, anti-consumer, anti-human ways.

I DO have a use for LLMs. I use it to tag data that has no tagging. I think the tech behind generative AI is extremely useful. Otherwise, what I see is a collection of ideal states that people fail to demonstrate to me in practice when in reality, it wont be replacing anyone until "the normies" can use it without 1000 lines of instructions markdown. Instead it will just fool people in its casual authoritative and convincing language since that it was it was designed to do.

[frizlab]

> Also, that "it's not really intelligence" horse is so dead, it has already turned into crude oil.

Why? Is it intelligence now? I think not.